Julie Schumacher: Chair of the Joint Committee on Education and Training

ada jones: If you love a comedy, this is for you.

United States on Nov 24, 2023

Amy Sarah Marshall: I so enjoyed this book. The structure, the voice, the wit...all perfectly timed, weighed, delivered. I laughed. I looked up delicious words. I found relief from corporate doublespeak, ie, my job.

United States on Nov 21, 2023

Hoppy: Engaging , humorous, book. Format: letters of recommendation for students and coworkers written by an egotistic, disgruntled professor of literature and writing. I am looking forward to reading the 2 sequels

United States on Nov 20, 2023

Marc Schiler: It was moderately funny, especially if you have some experience with faculty. It's written from the viewpoint of a somewhat crusty senior faculty member who is somewhat lacking in interpersonal skills. You have to keep track of what's going on with different recipients to get the whole story.

United States on Oct 28, 2023

Cathryn Conroy: In a word: Hilarious!

This is a witty, snarky, and comical skewering of modern-day college English departments, many of which are suffering from a lack of allocated funding from their universities as the number of English majors declines in favor of STEM majors. If you were an English major or have taught English at the collegiate level, treat yourself to this book, the first in a trilogy.

Written by Julie Schumacher, it is an epistolary novel, which I have to say made me reluctant to read it. I was so wrong to be concerned. The entire book is a series of letters of recommendation written over one year—September 2009 to August 2010—by the disgruntled and cantankerous Jason T. Fitger, a professor of creative writing and English at the fictional Payne University located somewhere in the Midwest. A second-tier school, but a first-rate story.

Schumacher is incredibly creative in carrying a novel plot (well, sort of a plot) throughout these letters, which range from recommendations for graduate school and retreat-style writing seminars to such employers as Avengers Paintball, Catfish Catering, Gropp's Liquor Lounge and Winemart, and Flanders Nut House—the...

United States on Aug 31, 2023

Frau Blucher: Easy to read and lots of fun. Added to that a perceptive look at human nature. Relationships and important details are revealed slowly and with great and subtle impact.

United Kingdom on Aug 22, 2023

Kindle Customer: This was an unusual book following letters written during one academic year by a professor of English. At first all his letters seem disjointed, fractious and eccentric. Then we learn of his own literary frustrations and sexual infidelities and their ramifications. I had many chuckles and eventually saw him as a different character from my first ideas.

United Kingdom on Jul 23, 2021

wölfing: This tale of a grumpy tenured professor at a minor American college presiding over the collapse of his department and the decay of his literary career bears comparison with the grumpiest characters of Robertson Davies and the pathos of Nabokov's Pnin. There is many a laugh along the way for anyone who has had contact with academic life; but the twist at the end, of which the narrator is unaware, is worthy of Evelyn Waugh. These comparisons are not intended to belittle the author's splendid originality of touch. Here is a sparkling new example of the old, old form of the epistolary novel.

United Kingdom on Nov 09, 2020

The Reading Room: A stylish and witty epistolary, but somewhat repetitive – 3 Stars

Presented as a series of letters written by professor Jason Fitger, ‘Dear Committee Members’ certainly succeeds in terms of humour and in revealing the personality of the letter writer. However, I found myself losing patience with Fitger’s self-centred whinging, and by half-way through this short book, just wished he’d settle for early retirement.

Fitger is one of those people who becomes embittered by their career but steadfastly refuses to do anything positive about it. As a professor, he is called upon to write numerous letters of recommendation for his students, and it is in these that he lets-rip about the injustices he believes have been heaped upon him. There’s not much that he doesn’t take objection to either; from the condition of his office, to the rejection of his favourite student’s work, all are interpreted by Fitger as personal insults.

I don’t have to like a character to enjoy reading about them, but I found Fitger as boring as he was unpleasant. While the letters that revealed something about how this man came to be such a curmudgeon were interesting, many of...

United Kingdom on Nov 05, 2020

Crookedmouth: Jay Fitger is Professor of Creative Writing and English at Payne University, somewhere in the American mid-West. His days are filled writing letters of recommendation in presumably fruitless attempts to usher his charges into gainful employment, railing against the arcane mysteries of online forms and oiling up his ex-wife and ex-lover. He strives, manfully at first, and subsequently with increasing desperation, to publicise his most promising student's work, "Accountant in a Bordello", a shattering reinterpretation of Herman Melville's "Bartleby". Meanwhile, the English Department's faculty buildings crumble and leak about him (Economics' are getting renovated, so why not English?).

"Dear Committee Members" is an epistolic novel, an exhibition-piece exercise in creative writing; big-hearted, quirky, warmly engaging and, in places, laugh-out-loud funny. Fitger describes one of his students as having "a mop of blond dreadlocks erupting from the top of his head like the yellow coils of an excess brain" and as one who "has bona fide thoughts and knows how to apportion them into relatively grammatical sentences". One wonders if Schumacher simply rummaged through her own email...

United Kingdom on Aug 25, 2014